Darwin1

a port in N Australia, capital of the Northern Territory: destroyed by a cyclone in 1974 but rebuilt on the same site. Pop: 71 347 (2001) Former name (1869–1911) Palmerston

Darwin2

/ˈdɑːwɪn/

noun

1.

Charles (Robert). 1809–82, English naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection, expounded in On the Origin of Species (1859) and applied to man in The Descent of Man (1871)

2.

his grandfather, Erasmus. 1731–1802, English physician and poet; author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1794–96), anticipating Lamarck's views on evolution

3.

Sir George Howard, son of Charles Darwin. 1845–1912, English astronomer and mathematician noted for his work on tidal friction

Northern Territory

noun

1.

an administrative division of N central Australia, on the Timor and Arafura Seas: the Arunta Desert lies in the east, the Macdonnell Ranges in the south, and Arnhem Land in the north (containing Australia's largest Aboriginal reservation); the Ashmore and Cartier Islands constitute a separate Australian External Territory. Capital: Darwin. Pop: 198 700 (2003 est). Area: 1 347 525 sq km (520 280 sq miles)

British naturalist who revolutionized the study of biology with his theory of evolution based on natural selection. His most famous works include Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).

(där'wĭn) British naturalist who proposed the theory of evolution based on natural selection (1858). Darwin's theory, that random variation of traits within an individual species can lead to the development of new species, revolutionized the study of biology.

Our Living Language: The flora and fauna of the Galápagos Archipelago, a group of islands 650 miles west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, provided the inspiration for Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which outlined his theory of evolution. Although Darwin spent some time studying medicine and later prepared for the clergy, graduating in 1828 from Christ's College, Cambridge, he couldn't deny his interest in geology and natural history. He spent five years (1831-36) as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle on an exploration of South America and Australia. In September 1835 the Beagle reached the Galápagos Archipelago. "This archipelago," Darwin wrote, "seems to be a little world within itself, the greater number of its inhabitants, both vegetable and animal, being found nowhere else." Darwin observed 26 species of birds, only one of which was known to exist anywhere else, as well as giant tortoises and other unusual reptiles. Each species, he observed, was uniquely adapted to the particular island on which it lived. Upon his return to England, Darwin refined his notes and continued to make scientific observations, this time of his own garden and of the animals kept by his family. In 1859, after 23 years of sustained work, he published On the Origin of Species, in which he argued that traits such as size and color vary from species to species and that individual variations of these traits are passed down from parents to offspring. More progeny are produced than there is available sustenance. Variations that contribute more successfully to attracting a mate and reproducing are passed down to more offspring, eventually influencing the entire species. Through this process of natural selection, the highly complex species of today gradually evolved from earlier, simpler organisms.

1. An operating system based on the FreeBSD version of Unix, running on top of a microkernel (Mach 3.0 with darwin 1.02) that offers advanced networking, services such as the Apacheweb server, and support for both Macintosh and Unix file systems. Darwin was originally released in March 1999. It currently runs on PowerPC based Macintosh computers, and, in October 2000, was being ported to Intel processor-based computers and compatible systems by the Darwin community. 2. A general purpose structuring tool of use in building complex distributed systems from diverse components and diverse component interaction mechanisms. Darwin is being developed by the Distributed Software Engineering Section of the Department of Computing at Imperial College. It is in essence a declarative binding language which can be used to define hierarchic compositions of interconnected components. Distribution is dealt with orthogonally to system structuring. The language allows the specification of both static structures and dynamic structures which evolve during execution. The central abstractions managed by Darwin are components and services. Bindings are formed by manipulating references to services. The operational semantics of Darwin is described in terms of the Pi-calculus, Milner's calculus of mobile processes. The correspondence between the treatment of names in the Pi-calculus and the management of service references in Darwin leads to an elegant and concise Pi-calculus model of Darwin's operational semantics. The model has proved useful in arguing the correctness of Darwin implementations and in designing extensions to Darwin and reasoning about their behaviour. Distributed Software Engineering Section (http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/). Darwin publications (http://scorch.doc.ic.ac.uk/dse-papers/darwin/). E-mail: Jeff Magee , Naranker Dulay nd@doc.ic.ac.uk. 3. Core War. (2003-08-08)